Sharon L. Clark, Author

Tag: editing

Happy New year 2021 large greeting card illustration

2020 in Review: What the Heck Just Happened?!

So. That was fun, right?

There is no way anyone filled a BINGO card this year. If they did, I would look askance at them as potentially masterminding some of this nonsense. Reviewing the things that happened in 2020, I find it difficult to believe that was all in the past twelve months. If you’ve been on TikTok, you’ve undoubtedly seen one of the many videos of a misunderstanding between God and an angel regarding a decade of disasters in one year. Watch it here – some language near the end.

I’m not so sure that isn’t what happened.

Here’s a quick rundown of the 2020 events I can recall:

  • Australia caught on fire.
  • Tiger King was everywhere.
  • COVID-19 made its debut, and refuses to leave.
  • Murder hornets crashed the party in the U.S. and a plague of locusts devastated East Africa.
  • Racial injustice was given a much-needed global stage.
  • California, Oregon, and Washington caught on fire.
  • Iowa endured a rare ‘land hurricane’ and now everyone knows what a derecho is.
  • We lost a multitude of actors, musicians, authors, politicians, athletes, scientists, and cultural icons including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Eddie Van Halen, Chadwick Bosemen, Kobe Bryant, Grant Imihara, John Lewis, and Alex Trebek.
  • Presidential Election. ‘Nuff said.

My family and I have been beyond fortunate, and we’ve even seen some shining lights in this year’s darkness. Our youngest moved to Chicago for college, our middle earned a prestigious academic opportunity, our oldest got engaged, and I signed with a literary agent. (Those last two events happened the same weekend in March, at the same time the world fell apart.) The summer was spent planning a small wedding and editing my first novel, and I can’t say there weren’t tears during both. In January, we’ll watch our daughter marry her best friend, then my novel will be sent into the world to find a publisher who will love it as much as I do.

Not such a boring start to the new year for the old Clark Clan.

Tomorrow is January 1, 2021. I hope against hope that the new year will be different. That it—and we—will be better. Perhaps all the trials we’ve been through were stepping stones or growing pains or lessons to be collectively learned. This year, I plan to take what the universe has to offer and make the best damn lemonade the world has ever seen.

My wish for you is that you’ll be able to take a deep breath, hold your loved ones close, and snuggle under a blanket of health, safety, and peace in 2021.

Happy New Year!

Ohhh…So THIS is Where Dystopian Novels Come From

What a wild time to be alive.

The past three months have been, in a word, tumultuous. It seems that a year’s worth of joy, fear, anger, sadness, and love has been crammed into just a few months.

Over one weekend in the middle of March, my son’s senior year ended abruptly, my daughter got engaged, I signed with a fantastic agent, and COVID-19 shut down most of the country. Life as we know it changed, I believe, irrevocably and overnight. Then recent events brought the ugly truth of racial disparity and police brutality into the spotlight, adding to an already volatile situation.

With everything that’s happened, I should have written a library of dystopian novels by now!

To be honest—and I know I’m not alone in this—being isolated at home, uncertain of what the future holds, has made it hard to focus. I find myself avoiding the computer, unable to write anything new as it all seems so trivial. Some days I sleep too much, other days I can’t make myself go to bed. I should be preparing my youngest for his first year of school in another state, planning a wedding with my daughter, talking with my middle child about his final year of college and his future. But it’s hard to make plans when everything can change in the blink of an eye. So what can I do?

I can keep moving forward. I can embrace hope and I can share love.

With the help of my agent, Katie, I am working on chapter-by-chapter revisions of my novel. I have been given the opportunity to spend quality time with my youngest before he flies the nest to start his real life. My middle child has demonstrated strength and compassion by using his voice to try to make a difference in the world. Wedding plans are progressing with my daughter, despite the darkness in our world, and even if it doesn’t look exactly as she’d initially dreamed.

And we all have contingency plans for our contingency plans.

I’ve found that now, more than ever, it’s imperative to stretch your creativity and leave your comfort zone. We must adapt or we die, and right now we are being forced to challenge the status quo and find better solutions—what better way than through creating, writing, and thinking outside the box?

Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.”

-Frank Zappa

How are you keeping your head above water these days? Are you pushing yourself, using new creative outlets, or brushing up on ones you’d forgotten? Drop me a comment or send me an email!

The End Is In Sight! Maybe. Probably Not…

I haven’t given an editing update on my novel for nearly a year and boy, has a lot happened since then! The last time I checked in, I was still trying to cut thousands of words and put together a sample query letter for a writers’ conference I was attending in March.

That’s a story for another time. Let’s fast forward.

To July. Yep, it took me that much longer to get my novel to a point that made me comfortable. I whittled my story down to roughly 94,000 words and had decided to go a step further and hire an editor. She was suggested to me by someone I admire and was an excellent fit for me. In my naive, sometimes conceited mind, I expected to be told that my manuscript was ready and I should compile my list of agents to query. (Think Ralphie’s daydream about his Red Rider theme paper.) Seriously, I thought I could send the story to the editor in early July and be querying agents by the end of August.

Ha.

Every developmental suggestion from the editor made sense to the point that I was embarrassed I hadn’t seen the need for the changes myself. Her suggestions made the story stronger and more believable, but it took me another several months to get through the changes and rewrites. After shaving an additional 20,000 words, my novel is back in the same editor’s hands for another round of suggestions and probable rewrites.

And I’m perfectly all right with that.

This process is tedious and sometimes disheartening, but I know the end product will be the best version possible. Not only that, but I’m learning so much about my writing and how to improve on it that my next novel(s) can only benefit from the mistakes I’ve made. I love my adverbs and weak, passive verbs, but that’s what editing is for and I’m not afraid of it anymore.

Two more novels are waiting patiently for me to complete them so they can be edited with the same love. I also have a file of story ideas trying to woo me with their shiny new plots and characters. Acting as a critical beta reader for friends, challenging myself with writing prompts, attempting to make a dent in my massive To Be Read pile; all of these things add to my toolbox that will build me up as a writer and I love it.

What surprises you about the process of writing a book? Feel free to ask about anything I’ve shared here by commenting below or reaching out through my email – I’d love to chat with you!

 

Dysfunction Takes a Holiday

For as long as I can remember, I have had a big imagination. I can’t think of a time in my life where I wasn’t playacting in some form or another. Sometimes it was Barbies with my sisters, sometimes it was movie reels in my head, sometimes it was me in front of my bedroom mirror. As an adult, it comes in the form of ‘what-if’ scenarios that play out as I clean or drive or, most often, walk the dogs.

The result of this big imagination is that I have a pile of story ideas jostling for attention.

My first story, posted on Channillo in mid-November of 2018 and in a Halloween anthology called Chills Down Your Spine, gave me the confidence to keep writing. After that, I wrote a few other slightly bizarre short stories and started three serials. One of them, The Path of Least Dysfunction, has been shared on this website weekly since it started in January 2019 and I have been so tickled by the responses I’ve received. A couple readers even picked teams, using #TeamJamie and #TeamChris on Twitter. Talk about an ego boost.

That’s why it’s bittersweet for me to say that Chapter 35, which went live on Channillo August 26 and will post here on September 11, is the last chapter of The Path of Least Dysfunction. At least for a while.

I haven’t stopped loving the story or the characters and I certainly adore the people who have been keeping up with it all along. But my attention was fractured and everything I am working on was suffering for it. At the beginning of the summer I sent my first completed novel, I’ll Call You Mine, for editing and haven’t touched it since I got notes back. There are three partial stories that I would still like to finish. November is fast approaching and I have yet another project I want to write for this year’s NaNoWriMo.

The inside of my head is a wild and crazy place and is getting a bit crowded.

For the next month I will be editing I’ll Call You Mine and working on only that. The last thing I want to happen is to leave readers hanging or give them boring stories and sub-par writing. This latest chapter gave me a place I could pause for a while without leaving a cliffhanger. I have loved writing about Alexis and Jamie and their crooked path to wedded bliss. At the beginning of the year I hope to continue their story. After all, they have a lot more story to tell.

Thank you so much for following along! I will continue to write and to post character bios, random thoughts, and story snippets.

Please share your thoughts in the comments below and stay tuned!

Summer Writing Shenanigans

There is a lot to love about the start of summer: the warmer temps, the longer days, vacations. And this year, it seems that spring is going to stretch at least to the first official day! For me, that means there are days that I can take my trusty laptop outside on the back patio to write without fear of drowning the keyboard in sweat.

Summer also brings with it Camp NaNoWriMo in July. Where NaNoWriMo takes place in November and challenges authors to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days, Camp NaNo is a little more flexible. Taking place in April and July, Camp lets you build or join a ‘cabin’ of other writers to support and encourage each other. You also can set your own goal, whether that is editing pages, writing lines of poetry, or writing another novel and setting your own word count objective.

I love Camp.

After my first NaNo year, I decided I needed the camaraderie and accountability of a writing group so I’ve created my own Cabin for each Camp for the last two years. It’s so fun to annoy my friends with daily encouragement quotes, to hold virtual meetups, to gather other local authors for donuts and writing on Saturday mornings. I look forward to Camp every spring and summer and kind of can’t wait for July to roll around!

This summer is also a big step for me in my writing journey. I am in the final round of edits for my novel, I’ll Call You Mine, incorporating notes and suggestions from my beta readers. Then, in the middle of July, I will send my baby off to a professional editor to see how I can fully polish it up and get it ready to shop out to agents.

This is a thing that is going to happen and it terrifies me.

It’s one thing to sit down and write for fun, maybe sharing with a friend or two, but with no real plans beyond that. But I have found that I want more than that. I’m realistic, I know it’s not easy to get an agent and even more difficult for that agent to sell an unknown author’s novel to a publisher. Putting myself out there will probably mean hundreds of rejections and stabs at my notoriously thin skin and fragile ego.

But what if…?

My summer is jam-packed with exciting writing, editing, and reading challenges. What are you planning to do this summer to push yourself and reach for your dreams? Comment below and thanks for reading!

procrastination, distractions

Procrastination and Other Editing Tools

Editing is an important and necessary part of writing anything – an essay, a blog post, even an email. It gives the author a chance to fix typos, catch repetitive words, and streamline the flow of what they are trying to convey. These are things I know and understand.

So why can’t I just get on with it?

Now diving into week 18 of editing my novel, it feels like I have made zero progress. April’s Camp NaNoWriMo was going to be the kick in the pants I needed to power through the necessary changes. I had grand designs of finishing 3 rounds of edits and sending my work to some beta readers to catch what I’ve missed and make suggestions. Then, by the time true summer rolled around, that bad boy would be ready for querying so I could get my “big break” and become the esteemed and lauded published author I was born to be.

Who am I kidding?

Apparently, I forgot that I am an expert-level procrastinator when it comes to my own best-laid plans. I have found new and ridiculous ways to put off editing. Some examples:

  • I’ve started two more serials, besides The Path of Least Dysfunction, that are also on Channillo. Because I needed to exponentially increase the self-imposed creative pressure already hanging over my head.
  • I’ve started to flesh out a new novel idea that’s been knocking at the back of my brain, whispering, “Let me in… I’m shiny and new and full of promise instead of fluff words and superfluous story lines that need to be viciously slashed and burned…”
  • I’ve jumped into the Twitter #WritingCommunity with both feet. While I have made some delightful new friends this way, it is also a black hole teeming with unnecessary and time-sucking discussions, tagging games, and polls.
  • I’ve added about 7 books to my reading list and will tell myself, “I’ll just read a couple chapters, maybe half an hour,” and will look up three hours later wondering what century it is.

It’s not all bad, of course. I am, actually, halfway through my second full round of edits, with another two rounds of word-purge behind me as well. There is some backstory that needs to GO, but I have to fill all the holes that will leave so it’s a bit slow-going.

Week 18 starts today, and with the harassment – er, encouragement – of my writing friends, I know I can get back on track.

Drop a note below and ask me questions, share your thoughts on my posts and stories, or just say hi! And if you’re curious about my other writing, check it out with a free trial membership to Channillo HERE.

novel editing, manuscript editing, query writing

Behind the Scenes: Editing Week 7

Since this is my first foray into editing my own novel I really had no idea how challenging it would be. I’m still plugging along, but it’s not the blazing trail of triumph I had been hoping for.

One good thing – I don’t hate my story.

I did when I first started, but now I feel a bit more hopeful. At the beginning I was staring down 163,000 words. Well, after seven weeks I am thrilled to tell you that I have pared it down to 147,000. Yikes.

An upcoming workshop I’ll be attending offers professional query letter or partial manuscript critiques, as well as face-to-face pitch options with a variety of agents in attendance. While there will be one agent there that I think would be a good fit for me, I am miles away from being ready for that. Instead, I chose to have both the first ten pages of my manuscript and a query letter critiqued.

That’s some scary stuff.

Preparing the ten pages was, honestly, pretty fun. I rewrote the entire first scene, adding in some dialogue to show what a jerk one of the central characters is. When I shared the new lines with my husband he was sufficiently offended by the passive-aggressive insults, so I think I got my point across.

However, it took me a good three days to write the query letter. Condensing a full novel into roughly 300 words designed to pique the agent’s interest enough to want to read the whole story is HARD. I almost gave up several times, but I had already plunked down some money for this service.

Plus, writing is something I’ve wanted to do for as long as I can remember.

Editing has turned out to be more enjoyable than I was expecting. I thought that I would either sob more frequently or chuck the whole thing in a fire long before now. My goal is to finish up around 100,000 words total – fewer, if possible. There are some scenes that I know are unnecessary and should simply be deleted and there are others that can be rewritten much more efficiently. The trick is determining which is which.

I know this is my own story but I can’t wait to see the finished product! The plan is to have it ready to query by the beginning of summer. Then I need to start editing my NaNoWriMo novel from last fall and have THAT ready to query before November.

And then I’ll start the process all over again.

How do you keep yourself accountable to your editing timetable? What has been the most challenging aspect of editing? I’d love to hear from you – comment below!